New OpenNTF Project: FileSendr Add-on

Posted by Niklas Heidloff on April 30, 2012

Win Stevens has created a new project
- FileSendr
Add-on. Below is how he describes
the project:

Everybody is using e-mail. Despite
the availability of new social tools we are still using e-mail to send
tons of information over the Internet and within the company. Mailboxes
become overloaded, system administrators have a difficult time in making
daily back-ups.
Most SMTP servers impose message size restrictions. I have no global
figures but in my company the mail size is limited to 10 MB. I know
of other servers that refuse mails larger than 2 MB. Gmail is more
forgiving and allows you to send a 25 MB limit.
As Domino administrators we must warn our users and advice them to keep
message size below 5 MB. However the size of a good marketing presentation
in Powerpoint goes very quickly above this limit.
Then came FileSendr.
A wonderful XPage application written by Declan Lynch. It could
be used within your company but also for delivering big files to external
contacts. I rolled-out FileSendr for one of my customers; I informed
all 1000 Notes users but - to my surprise - people were not fully happy.
Yes, they could send large mails. But, each time they created
a mail message, they had to make an estimate of the message size. If
too large they had to look-up the FileSendr URL and create the mail outside
their day-to-day mail client.
With some other Domino administrators we started brainstorming. Could
we come up with a better solution without having to reinvent FileSendr
? And this with a small budget. The answer was a FileSendr Add-on.
The idea is very simple: do tell anything to the end-user. They
are allowed to send big mails (we set the limit at 300 MB). On the
Domino server we created one additional mail rule: "if the mail is
larger than 5MB move it to the FileSendr Add-on database". This
is a standard Domino feature. No need to install a server-hook or
some other tricky software.
When the router deposits the message in the FileSendr add-on database it
triggers a LotusScript agent. After a few minutes (depending on the
amgr settings of your server) the agents code starts running: it creates
a document in the FileSendr database, moves the body of the mail and the
attachments into the document, generates a secret key and informs the recipients
of the presence of the download. Optionally, the sender of the mail
is informed about the interception of the mail message. Net result:
we did not have to train the end users, adoption is automatic, users are
happy.
The FileSendr Add-on application has some additional settings: - blacklist/whitelist: you could restrict
some people of using the system - max message size

Aren't there any disadvantages ? I would
say a few. First of all the large mail will probably be stored in
the Sent folder of the sender. Secondly, the system works transparent
for sending large mails. Reception of large mails from the Internet
is more difficult. The mail will probably never arrive to our server.
All suggestions and remarks are welcome. Some people have already
downloaded the product. Let us know about your experiences.